Nimue Brown's Blog, page 151

Ocean Aid Concerts to Help Mother Ocean

A guest blog from Steve Andrews

You will no doubt be familiar with the Band Aid and Live Aid rock/pop concerts of the past, but I think we need new concerts under the banner of Ocean Aid. 

Plastic pollution is everywhere these days and it is becoming widely known that it is killing marine life, including whales, turtles, seals and seabirds that swallow it mistaking it for food, or by getting tangled up in the material. Many people think of this planet as Mother Earth, and whilst this is a wonderful description of our home world, I think we should be referring to all the seas combined as “Mother Ocean.” Science has told us that early life started there, and life on this planet depends on the health of the oceans. 

I have a song entitled Where Does All The Plastic Go?. It was produced by Jayce Lewis, and is included on my album Songs of the Now and Then. Many famous musicians and singers, including Mick Jagger, Cerys Matthews,  Brian May, Chrissie Hynde and Kanye West, have spoken out about plastic pollution but I am leading the way with songs about the subject. Just think if stars like this could be persuaded to take part in a massive Ocean Aid concert in a stadium somewhere!

With the ongoing pandemic causing lockdowns and restrictions, many musicians famous and not so famous, have taken to performing concerts online using livestreaming via Facebook, Zoom and other options. This got me thinking that Ocean Aid concerts could be organised like this, and the more of them the better. Small ones can help inspire the world of music and the media to take enough notice so that a massive concert could be organized, a concert that would attract the internationally famous celebrities. Because plastic pollution is a worldwide problem, the concerts can take place worldwide. 

It is not just the threat of plastic waste that is endangering oceanic life. Overfishing, acidification, seabed mining, military testing, nuclear waste dumping, coral bleaching, agricultural run-off causing dead zones, and climate change, are all taking a heavy toll too.  Ocean Aid concerts could raise awareness about these problems as well. There are organisations like Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, already doing what they can to help save the seas and the life in them. Funds raised by the concerts can go to charitable environmental organisations like this. 

As a singer-songwriter I realised that one way I could take action and spread the word was by using music to help me, and after writing my song about plastic pollution I came up with this Ocean Aid idea. Raising awareness about Mother Ocean is my main focus this year. Please think about helping me make Ocean Aid concerts a reality. If you are a musician, think about organising Ocean Aid gigs, if you are not a musician but want to help, you can do so by spreading the word and reaching out to anyone you know that could make Ocean Aid a dream that becomes a reality. Let’s do what we can to help our Mother Ocean!

Find more of Steve’s music here:

https://bardofely.bandcamp.com/track/where-does-all-the-plastic-go

https://soundcloud.com/bardofely/where-does-all-the-plastic-gohttps://open.spotify.com/album/1pboeHP1Fq2G9tsaKywnNF

If you want to get in touch with Steve, leave a comment and I’ll pass it along.

Witch in a Bottle part 4

A Wyrde Woods Tale

By Nils Visser

Part 4: Goody Malone to the Rescue

“What the rabbits…” The Stupes intuitively aimed their torches at the silvered bottle, which promptly exploded into the brilliance of a flash of lightning.

Joy removed her thumb from the bottle’s opening and began to chant, “Fus sceal feran, fæge sweltan. Mod sceal thee mare, thee ure mægen lytlath.”

“Witch!” one of the Stupes hissed, and stumbled backward.

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” the leader snarled, but he too backed off a little.

Joy ignored them, her focus entirely on the ancient words, her tone increasingly exuberant. “Sitte ge, sigewif, sigath to eortha! Næfre ge wilde to Wyrdwuda fleogan! Næfre ge wilde to Wyrdwuda fleogan!”

She looked at the bottle expectantly, as did all of the others.

Nothing happened.

Joy’s heart sank.

“Blimey,” Maisy said.

“Right,” the Stupe leader said. “The nidgets have had their fun. GRAB THEM!”

The other Stupes moved at the children, to halt almost immediately as Will began to shout.

“Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive![1]”

Maisy joined him “It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive!”

Nan Malone’s bottle, however, remained bereft of any kind of animation.

“Fools,” the Stupe leader berated his colleagues. “They’re playing tricks on—”

His voice was drowned out by an almighty crash and splintering of wood within the ruined church.

Joy realised instantly what Nan Malone, the only Guardian who never feared the creature, had done, even before the stale and musky air that had been trapped in the church’s crypt for centuries reached her nose.

Maisy and Will’s words echoed in her thunderstruck mind.

It’s alive. It’s alive. It’s alive!

“What the blazes?” Will made to turn around, and Joy reached out with her free hand to stop him.

She issued urgent instructions at her friends. “Get on the ground, roll up into a ball. Keep your eyes shut. Do NOT open them until I say…”

“But Joy, what…” Maisy began to protest.

“LISTEN to me,” Joy hissed. “Do it NOW.”

Her friends were puzzled, and a little frightened, but did as Joy commanded.

In the nick of time. Joy didn’t need to turn around to confirm what was emerging from the ruins. She could read it on the faces of the Stupes, who stared dumbstruck, two of them dropping their torches and fumbling with shaking hands for their shotguns.

Joy also sensed its presence. A menacing and malicious aura, with a seemingly primeval appetite for destruction. It was hauling in deep breaths, as if relishing the sweet taste of fresh air after centuries of confinement. There was a rustling sound as it unfolded its great wings, shaking the dust off its black feathers with something between a sob and a sigh escaping from its sharp beak.

The Stupes, staring straight into those red glowing eyes, trembled with fear and began to back off, away from Ellette Hornsby’s tomb and the nightmare that had appeared behind it – one described so accurately by Maisy and Will earlier on.

“Take the chavees,” their leader implored. “Leave us be.”

Joy felt those glowing eyes behind her boring right through her soul.

Nan Malone had been the only Guardian to feel sympathy for the creature. The monstrous entity, Joy knew, would bear little love for those associated with the Guardians as a whole. Yet, Nan Malone had chosen to aid Joy by releasing the shadow that had languished so long within the crypt. The old healer wasn’t visible, but here now nonetheless, that much was clear.

“W…what is that thing?” the bulky Stupe asked in a small frightened voice.

“Ufmanna,” the Stupe leader answered. “The little bitch has released Ufmanna.”

Joy shut her eyes, half-expecting to feel the creature’s talons sinking into her flesh, seeking to claw out her heart.

We released you. We mean you no harm.

There was an angry snort behind her and Joy tensed up.

So be it.

She spread her arms wide – Nan Malone’s bottle still in one hand  –, arched her back, and turned her face to the moon.

Spare my friends. They have naught to do with this.

She could hear Ufmanna’s wings as it took to the air, making straight for the tomb. It shrieked eerily, much as a scritch owl would, but the sound was magnified a thousandfold and seemed to pierce Joy’s very bones.

Ufmanna came close enow to snatch Nan Malone’s bottle from Joy’s hand. Without a pause though, sweeping right past her to head straight for the Stupes.

One of the shotguns was discharged with a thunderous blast, but the shot was panicked and not aimed properly, kicking up a small fountain of earth at the base of Ellette’s tomb.

The rat-faced Stupe dropped his gun, the barrel smoking, and scampered out of the churchyard, screaming like a stuck pig. The others followed in a blind panic, dropping torches and guns, the bulky Stupe whimpering pathetically, the leader crying for his mother.

Ufmanna pursued, its torso the size of a man’s but on the whole much larger due to a fearsomely broad wingspan. It clutched Nan Malone’s bottle in one claw, holding it with care because Joy had no doubt that it could have easily crushed the silvered glass just by flexing its talons ever so lightly.

The Stupes made it out of the churchyard and fled toward the Taunflow. Their frightened screams appeared to be mocked by Ufmanna, the creature no longer scritching like an owl, but mimicking the men’s horrified cries of fear instead. Ufmanna, Joy knew, liked to play with its victims with the cold dispassion of a cat toying with a cornered mouse.

Unable to withstand their curiosity any longer, Maisy and Will scrambled onto the tomb just in time to see the Stupes stampeding down the broad dirt path before they were swallowed up by the night, Ufmanna’s dark shadow on their heels. 

“What the hell!” Will exclaimed in disbelief.

“Did that…thing…come out of the bottle?” Maisy asked.

Joy hesitated, before answering, “Naun, out of the crypt. It were lured there after the plague, and sealed in…”

…with powerful spells by the Guardians who survived Nan Malone.

“What kind of animal is it?” Will asked.

“Naun an animal,” Joy said. “Ufmanna means Owl Man. Tis man-made, in a fashion.”

“Aha,” Maisy said, as if that made perfect sense. “Like Doctor Moreau.”

“Or Frankenstein,” Will added. “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful![2]”

Joy stared at them speechlessly. The mere sight of Ufmanna was enow to drive most folk out of their own minds, and here her friends were discussing it casually as if they had just been to the pictures again.

“Nah-ah.” Maisy shook her head. “I reckon Moreau. You made us…things! Not men! Not beasts! Part man…part beast! Things![3]”

Will added sombrely, “I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world.[4]”

The cousins chuckled and chortled, a sound that drew Valkerie back to Maisy’s shoulder. It occurred to Joy that her friends were likely to be partially in shock and employing the magic of the silver screen to cope. There was a broth Joy could make, at the cottage where she lived with her mother, which would leastways take the edge off.

Mum’ll find out soon enow that Ufmanna’s free. I had no choice, twere that or be taken to Malheur. But I’ll get a proper dish of tongues no matter what.

In the distance, the Stupes stopped screaming one by one.

“We’d better go,” Joy decreed. “Ufmanna might come back.”

There were no objections. Maisy didn’t even frown when Joy told her to leave the torches and shotguns where the Stupes had dropped them, even though Joy knew for sure Maisy would be much disappointed to not be getting her hands on a shotgun.

They walked away from Tuckersham in silence and at considerable pace. It wasn’t until they had passed Lewinna’s Pond that they eased up somewhat.

“Joy,” Will said hesitantly. “That bottle, the words you spoke…are you a—”

“Yes,” Joy answered quickly, reckoning there was no point denying the obvious. “But your spells worked bettermost too.”

“My spells?” Will asked.

“The both of you. I’ve heard of the magic of the silver screen afore, but nohows believed it to have dunnamuch power.”

Maisy laughed. “It ain’t quite like that, is it?”

Joy shook her head. There were things she could no longer keep from her friends after this night, but nor could they deny the power of the pictures, not after what Joy had witnessed. To prove her point, she exercised her first foray into this new magic, by admitting to the cousins that she was ready for her first ever visit to the moving pictures. This was partially because Joy reckoned she should educate herself in this manner of magic, and partially because it took the cousins’ mind off Tuckersham and Ufmanna. They spent the rest of their walk to Joy’s home in a fervent and very learned debate on whether to take Joy to The Door with Seven Locks or The Thief of Bagdad. Valkerie, casting a wary eye upward, was the only one in the company who observed a witch in a bottle sparkling like a diamond as she orbited the silver moon in the gentle grasp of a dark shadow, free at last in the night sky.

THE END

BIO

The author, told once too often that he spent too much time in his imagination, finally took the hint and moved there on a full-time basis. He now divides his time between the Wyrde Woods, a Steampunked smuggling world, and the high seas in search of the Flying Dutchman. www.nilsnissevisser.co.uk

Joy, Maisy, and Valkerie feature in Secrets of the Wyrde Woods: Forgotten Road. Will is added to the mix in Will’s War in Exile. A much older Joy and Will feature in Escape from Neverland and Dance into the Wyrd, as well as a certain troubled soul in army boots and skull-patterned dress, and Ufmanna, the Owl Man of Tuckersham. A translation of Joy’s spell can be found in Draka Raid, also set in the Wyrde Woods forever and longer ago when Viking raids were fashionable. You could try googling the spell, I suppose, but where’s the adventure in that?

[1] Dr Henry Frankenstein (played by Colin Clive)in Frankenstein (1931)

[2] From Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley (1818)

[3] Sayer of the Law (played by Béla Lugosi) in Island of the Lost Souls (1932)

[4] From The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells (1896)

Free Books

For some time now, I’ve been giving away pdfs of my self-published work. As many of you have followed the blog since I started doing that, you may not have seen all of these and you might want to get in for them.

At present I have 4 pdfs in my ko-fi store. They’re ‘pay what you like’ and it is totally fine not to pay anything if you are short of money. if you want to drop something in the hat that’s lovely and it helps me stay viable while giving work away, which is a win all round I think.

Mapping the Contours – poetry with strong landscape themes. https://ko-fi.com/s/8e7caa2cfc

Druidry and the future – non-fiction https://ko-fi.com/s/6f6d37772a

How to Unpeel a monster -poetry with themes of identity and being unacceptable https://ko-fi.com/s/6c04e1cb8c

Wherefore series 1 – daftness, animism, magic, https://ko-fi.com/s/2241a51430

Time out

Rather excitingly, I’m poised to have a week off. I didn’t manage to take a whole week off at any point in 2020 – one of the problems with the kind of work I do is that I have to do all the same work ahead of time to get a week off, which is arduous and I don’t always have the energy for it.

I’m in the process of changing how I work. My aim is to have my work life be less exhausting in the first place. I’m also looking at things I can do to reduce pain and improve sleep. I live in hope.

I’ve got the blog set up to post in my absence – thanks to contributions from guest bloggers it hasn’t been too difficult to keep up a content flow while also taking a break. If you’d like to guest blog with me, I’m always open to that sort of thing.

Time off is essential for mental health, for quality of life, for creativity and functionality. The UK government has been making some ominous noises about cutting worker’s rights now we are out of the EU. As someone who is self employed, I don’t really have those rights, but I am more than prepared to stick up for the people who do. The way I’ve been living is not optimal and I have no desire to see anyone else stuck in the same kind of relentless work grind.

Knowledge, hypervigilance and control

Knowledge is power. In some situations, knowledge can be the difference between safety and danger, life and death.  And so, like many people at the start of the pandemic, I scrolled frantically looking for any information that would help me navigate.

I’m fortunate in that I’m fairly bright and decently educated and I know how to pick out good information from dross. I know how to read scientific content – I can’t read papers but I can get through a synopsis at least. I’m not unsettled by talk of probabilities- science rarely deals in certainties. I was looking for things that would shift the odds in my favour, and I found those – masks, ventilation, meeting people outside.

However, by the time I’d found what I needed, the habit of hypervigilance was back in, and I was also struggling to sleep. Hypervigiliance is not a new issue for me.  It’s a problem common for people who have endured bullying or lived with abuse. You pay attention to all the details, looking for signs of threat. When the rules change all the time, the goalposts shift, the hazards are unpredictable, when anger and blame can result from the slightest mistake, you learn to be hypervigilant to survive. And with the covid rules changing all the time, and the science evolving, I fell back into that, and it got into other areas of my life.

I found out quite by accident that I had been running high levels of hypervigilance for months. It explains the levels of body pain and exhaustion I’ve been dealing with. Being on high alert all the time is expensive. Scrutinising every detail is hard on the brain. Never relaxing, never feeling safe… it takes a massive toll and I’ve been doing it for months. Having broken out of the space where I was doing that, I feel hopeful that I can make a recovery. I’ve done it before, but this part of the process is challenging because I feel alarmed by not sifting for data all the time.

If you’ve found the last year exhausting, it may be that you’re in a similar process – with pandemic information, work upheavals, financial pressures and home schooling all likely sources of incentives to be hypervigilant.  Not seeing friends and family may mean you’re trying to divine from facebook posts how they really are. If some of them are vulnerable, this may be really hard work. If stepping away from the information sources is also stressful and scary, that’s a strong indicator of hypervigilance. It takes time to get over it, but knowing that the initial stages of breaking away feel awful may make it easier to navigate that.

If you’re going through anything similar to me, I wish you peace and calm. If the first steps towards that are hard, don’t be daunted, this is the way out. If you feed your brain less data to obsess over, it will eventually start to calm down.

Positivity and Self Harm

Some time ago I decided that maybe the problem is me. I’m too negative. I don’t practice gratitude enough. I invest too much energy in feeling sorry for myself. A better, more positive attitude would, surely, make me happier and nicer to be around?

So I scoured the internet for positivity memes, and I wrote them in my diary. Every time I felt the panic or despair coming on, I’d read them out loud. Everything happens for my highest good. My life is full of blessings. I am grateful for how good and rich my life is. That sort of thing, and other statements like it.

I did this for some days.

It did not result in me feeling happier, better, or more positive. It did however give me increasing feelings about the invalidity of my distress. I did not become more grateful. The final stage of this resulted in me crying, hysterical, howling things like ‘my life is so great and I feel so happy right now’ while pummelling my fists into my body. Which compared to the violence I wanted to perpetrate on myself at that point, was fairly mild. I had to be physically restrained, and it took me some considerable time to recover.

I can’t recommend it.

Trying to paste inauthentic ideas and feelings over the top of distress does not make the distress go away. It adds to the distress. If I hadn’t been in such an awful state to start with, I would likely have remembered that I think this kind of positivity is toxic. But I was desperate and in a great deal of pain, and I felt like the problem was me. This kind of ‘positive’ thinking perpetuates the idea that you, the individual, are the problem. Not your context, not your socio-economic status, not your health or the people around you, but you personally and how you ‘choose’ to think about things.

Not everything can be fixed by changing how you think about it. In some circumstances, trying to tell a more positive story might be a really dangerous thing to do. It certainly didn’t go well for me.

Stories about love

When you’re a straight, cis person in a monogamous relationship, being out is easy. My guess is that you don’t worry so much about how people will react to your romance unless there’s something else queer about it – a sizeable age gap for example,  or being in a mixed race or mixed religion relationship where the people around you might not be ok with that.

I’ve always been polyamorous, but I’ve not always been out as polyamorous. Early on I had no idea how to navigate around friends and family with this, so mostly I didn’t. The emotional expense of being honest about your relationships may be more than you can afford. For some people, owning the queerness is genuinely dangerous. Complicated, non-conforming relationships can be challenging enough without all the work of having to emotionally support other people in dealing with you well.

The worst part of all this, for me, has always been the breakups. The invisible, unspeakable endings of relationships I never made properly visible in the first place. When a conventional relationship breaks up, people tend to own it and the people around them tend to be supportive. When you’ve fallen out with your other lover… how do you even talk about that? Can you be confident  of expecting support, rather than blame, shame, judgement and more pain?

Many of my most important love affairs have been romantic rather than sexual, so I don’t entirely fit in what many people imagine ‘polyamorous’ means in the first place. I can get deeply emotionally involved with a person without it ever being a physical thing. So, what a relationship is and means to me is not necessarily the same as what it means to the other person – that’s always interesting to navigate. I know there are people in my history who, for me, were life altering love affairs, and who almost certainly never thought the same way about me. Which is fine – love is what I do, not what I expect.

So here I am, grieving the end of a love affair that never quite was. Letting go of something that, for a while, was pure enchantment for me, but that maybe only existed for me. Wondering what to say to who, and finding out who knew me well enough to have spotted it anyway. It’s a strange place to be. There are no maps for this kind of territory. There are no roles readily supplied to slot into, there are precious few stories to navigate by.

I’ve also got to the point in my life of being unable to be other than myself. I’m too tired to hide the inconvenient bits. I’m past caring about people judging me – and increasingly willing to shrug and let go of the people who aren’t ok with me as I am. One of the consequences is that I can, and will start mapping this territory and telling stories about love that are not the stories my society usually tells.

Taking it personally

I’ve always been thin skinned. I’ve been told I take things too personally and that I over-react. This week it struck me that this isn’t a character flaw, it’s a coping mechanism.  I’m probably not alone in this.

If everything is going to be your fault, then being hypersensitive to criticism can help you catch problems before they escalate. If mistakes are punishable offences, you have to be hypervigilant around  criticism. What looks like being over-sensitive about things is an early warning system trying to detect threats before they get out of control.

This could easily become an issue for anyone with an abuse legacy, or who has had to survive in a toxic work environment. That thin skin is because you can’t afford to ignore any kind of negative feedback for fear of the consequences.

It has been a bit of a shock releasing that a large amount of how I respond to negativity is not necessarily who I am, but what I’ve learned to do in order to try and stay safe. I feel immensely threatened by criticism – and most of the time there’s no need. Most of the people I deal with will not punish me for real mistakes, much less ones they have imaged. Who would I be if I could take other people’s negativity in my stride? Who would I be if I wasn’t terrified every time I make a mistake?

It goes with the other coping mechanisms of over explaining and having to justify myself. It goes with having to check everything I do and feel to try and work out if it is reasonable and rational or not – and thus whether it might be permitted. Who would I be if I felt entitled to my own emotional responses and not like I had to be able to defend them?

Often, people who are thin skinned and easily upset are accused of being melodramatic and making it all about them. I’ve seen that one happen to other people as well as to me. I wonder how many other people who are knocked about by criticism react that way because it is a danger sign, a red flag, an ominous portent of far worse things to come?

I’m increasingly convinced that if someone seems to over-react, the key thing might be to focus on trying to make sure they feel safe. If you’re safe, you don’t have to be perfect in very possible way, you don’t have to psychically know what you were supposed to do without being told. When you are safe, another person’s bad mood or shitty day is not a danger sign, it’s just what’s going on. If you are with people who will not use you as a punch bag – literally or emotionally – then you don’t have to be hypersensitive to possible danger signs.

I may be becoming more resilient around this issue, because I have been safe enough for long enough for that to be possible.

Witch in a Bottle part 3

A Wyrde Woods Tale

By Nils Visser

Part 3: Stupes & Silver Screen Magic

It wasn’t a particularly loud sneeze, and hastily muffled by Will who immediately threw a hand over his nose. The Stupes were gamekeepers, though.  They might be strong in the arm and thick in the head, but they knew the difference between regular nocturnal sounds in the woods and noises that did not belong.

“What’s that?”

The children ducked low as light beams swept over the graves and tombs.

“It be nothing but your imagination,” one of the others suggested.

“Naun,” the third said. “Some-one-body is here.”

They moved surprisingly quick, spreading about the churchyard to sweep their powerful torches this way and that, and it wasn’t long before one of them discovered the children huddled by the tomb.

“Over here!” He called the others. They were canny enow to surround the children on three sides, with the church wall behind them preventing an easy escape.

The children reluctantly rose to their feet, trying to shield their eyes from the three blinding lights aimed at them.

“I’m so sorry,” Will said miserably.

“Well, well, well,” one of the Stupes growled with satisfaction. “What have we here?”

“Bain’t naun of your purvension,” Joy bit at him.

“That redhead be the devil’s spawn from the Whitfield witch,” another Stupe commented.

“And the little one be Fred Maskall’s granddaughter,” the third Stupe said. “I seen her afore.”

“I’m not little!” Maisy yelled angrily.

“I reckon his Lordship will be wanting to scorse pleasantries with them.”

Joy was mortified. The last thing she wanted was to be hauled off to Malheur Hall to be confronted with Mordecai Malheur. He had scores to settle with both Joy and Maisy, and if he found out who Will was, the boy would be dead before dawn. Malheur had the means, the motive, and the ruthless cruel streak required for murder most foul.

“We ain’t done nothing wrong!” Maisy protested. Valkerie hissed her agreement from her perch on the girl’s shoulder.

“Really?” one of the Stupes asked. “A poacher’s kin out and about in the woods this time of night, with a ferret?”

The other Stupes laughed.

Joy looked around anxiously, but any attempt to scatter and run would end with at least one of them seized and dragged to Malheur Hall, if not all three. Or worse, the shotguns would come into play.

“Enow of this,” the Stupe who appeared to be the leader decided. “We’d best bind their hands.”

The other two began to advance, cautiously as if expecting the children to make a run for it.

Joy suddenly became acutely aware of the weight of Nan Malone’s bottle in her hands. Mordecai Malheur would be delighted to take possession of such an item and the power it might yield him.

Blood, horn, root, thorn, tooth, bone, wood, and stone.

 “I’m going to open the bottle,” she hissed at her friends.

She reckoned it was a risk worth taking, given the circumstances. Nan Malone had been a Guardian of the Wyrde Woods after all. Joy tried to pull the stopper out but it refused to yield.

“What’s that you got there?” the Stupe leader asked, directing his torch at Joy’s hands.  He began to advance on them as well.

Time! Joy needed more time.

Maisy understood. She jumped up on Ellette’s tomb, taking a firm stance and caterwauling like she was fresh out of Bedlam. “Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart![1]”

The Stupes stopped in their tracks. All their torches were now aimed at Maisy, allowing Joy to see them looking at her friend with wide eyes, their mouths hanging open as they tried to make sense of Maisy’s strange utterances.

Will jumped up too, joining his cousin in speaking the magic words from the silver screen. “The skies are red with the thunderbolts of Genghis Khan! They rain down.[2]”

Joy pulled at the stopper with all her might. It was too small for even her nimble fingers to get a good grip and didn’t budge.

“By Pize,” the Stupe leader said. “They’re as daft as a brush.”

His companions agreed.

“Few bricks short of a middling load, sureleye.”

“Naun the sharpest acorns in a treacle mine, tis unaccountable.”

Maisy was outraged, “I heard all the things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell! How then, am I mad?[3]”

“Crazy, am I?” Will demanded to know. “We’ll see whether I’m crazy or not![4]”

“You be a proper dinlow,” the bulkiest of the Stupes said.

“Willocky and doddlish in the head,” the slightest of the Stupes added, a sneer on his rat-like face.

“Puggled beyond a doubt,” the Stupe leader concluded. “And a mite addled, sureleye.”

Despite their derision, the men stayed where they were, uncertainty in their body language.

Joy decided on a different approach, trying to tug the stopper this way and that to see if wriggling would loosen its hold on Nan Malone’s bottle.

Will spoke to the men sternly, appearing to be thoroughly enjoying himself. “Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.[5]”

Maisy was definitely having a grand time of it, intoning gravely, “The Spirit of Evil is trying to enter this tomb, but have no fear, the fires of death will guard us.[6]”

Even as she kept her eyes focused on the stubborn stopper, Joy sensed the confusion of the gamekeepers. Stupes fared best with the straight and forward, they had a regimented sense of how things ought to be. Will and Maisy’s invocation of the pictures was likely to be beyond anything they had ever experienced and it confused them. Within that confusion, Joy sensed the first sparks of fear.

No matter how dim, the men were locals fed on a steady diet of Wyrde Woods tales. They all knew the Wyrde Woods some-one-time harboured the impossible. Maisy and Will’s magic was working.

What wasn’t working were Joy’s efforts to open the bottle. She looked at it angrily, half-tempted to just smash the bottle for a brief instant, but she immediately knew that Nan Malone wouldn’t take kindly to that, Guardian or not.

Maisy spoke again, “Presently I shall assume a state of trance, in which the outer mind merges with the astral portion of the human ego.[7]”

Valkerie scrambled down the girl’s arm, leaping onto the tomb’s lid.

One of the Stupes took a backward step, muttering, “Witchcraft.”

“Listen to them!” Will announced pompously. “Children of the night. What music they make.[8]”

“There’s nothing to fear,” Maisy said reassuringly. “Look. No blood, no decay. Just a few stitches.[9]”

Joy was distracted by Valkerie, who dooked at her urgently, the ferret’s eyes fixed intently on the witch bottle. Not knowing what else to do, Joy lowered the bottle. She despaired, knowing that sooner or later the silver screen magic would be overcome when the Stupes recalled that they had shotguns and were by far bigger and stronger than the children.

Will intoned, “You have created a monster, and it will destroy you![10]”

The Stupe leader must have decided that the Maskall cousins were harmless fools. “Enow of your hurley-bulloo, impersome nidgets. Or you’ll catch hurt, sureleye.”

“You’d bettermost believe him,” the rat-faced Stupe added. “He be teddious and tempersome. If he chooses to give you a proper bannicking, you’ll be shrucking and skreeling a different tune, sureleye.”

Maisy hollered defiantly, “to die, to be really dead, that must be glorious![11]”

Valkerie dooked again. Joy looked down, her eyes widening in astonishment and disbelief. It had taken the ferret mere seconds to relieve the bottle of its stopper. The ferret looked at Joy with what appeared to be triumphant satisfaction, then loped off with the stopper. Joy quickly seized the bottle, pressing her thumb over the opening.

Just as the men began to move forward again, Joy jumped up on the tomb, took place between Maisy and Will, and lifted Nan Malone’s bottle high.

[1] The boy (played by Norman Dryden) in The Tell-Tale Heart (1934)

[2] Doctor Fu Manchu (played by Boris Karloff) in The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

[3] The boy (played by Norman Dryden) in The Tell-Tale Heart (1934)

[4] Dr Henry Frankenstein played by Colin Clivein Frankenstein (1931)

[5] Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

[6] Prince Saliano (played by Béla Lugosi) in You’ll Find Out (1940). ‘Tomb’ has replaced the original ‘room’

[7] Prince Saliano (played by Béla Lugosi) in You’ll Find Out (1940)

[8] Count Dracula to Jonathan Harker. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

[9] Dr Henry Frankenstein (played by Colin Clive) in Frankenstein (1931)

[10] Doctor Waldman (played by Edward van Sloan)in Frankenstein (1931)

[11] Count Dracula to Mina Seward. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)

Find out more about Nils ad the Wyrde Woods here – https://nilsnissevisser.co.uk/

Meditation and the Pandemic

I’m seeing plenty of advice online to use meditation as a way to cope with the pandemic. This may or may not work for you. If it does – all power to you.

The fears caused by covid, the isolation of lockdown, the exhausting nature of ever-changing rules, the financial insecurities, the uncertainty – these all take a toll. These are things that take a lot of processing and that doesn’t leave a person with much concentration. You may be exhausted. You may be emotionally overwhelmed, or numb, and you may not be able to hold together a meditative practice.

Be gentle with yourself if this is the case. If you are using meditation, the whole point is to improve your quality of life, not to come up with another stick you can beat yourself with. Here are some things that might help.

Don’t worry about how long you meditate for – whatever your practice looked like before, let that go. Do what you can. If that’s just a few minutes, fine, and well done. If you can’t focus every day, that’s fine too.

Switch over to contemplation and use your meditation time for processing. Let your thoughts work themselves through and don’t try to shut down the ‘chatter’ in your mind because you may well need to give it more space, not less.

If being in your head isn’t working for you, pick meditation strategies that don’t rely entirely on personal mental discipline. Try moving meditations, contemplating cards, objects or other images. Use guided visualisation and pathworking material where you have someone else’s voice or written words providing the structure and keeping you on track.

If trying to meditate makes you feel miserable and frustrated right now, let it go. It’s not the tool for every situation. It’s not a magic cure-all. If it doesn’t work for you right now, invest your time in something else. It’s not a failing to need different tools.